


Red As Blood

by Brighid



Category: Smallville
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:39:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brighid/pseuds/Brighid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Always winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red As Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the early days of Smallville, many things utterly Jossed.

Red as Blood  
by Brighid

It was winter, he remembers that, a crisp cold day. Snow was thick on the balconies of the apartment and the windows were glossed with frost-stars. He'd breathed hard on the glass, but the windows were heavy, the best money could buy, and the fractal ice had refused to melt.

Everything inside was warm and bright and smelled ... sweet, spicy, like the hollow of his mother's neck. Music was playing and Mara had slipped him gingerbread and Father was coming home and the whole house was breathless with it. Only Mother was quiet, getting her beauty sleep.

He remembers slipping out onto the balcony that bordered his room, scooping the gleaming white snow into the bowl Mara had brought the gingerbread in. He'd carried it carefully, quickly, so that it didn't melt, down to his mother's suite, had shaken her gently with cold, wet fingers. Her eyes had opened slowly, but she'd smiled at him, gathered him up beside her as she sat up in the cocoon of pillows and blankets, and it was, he thought, the best thing ever, safe and warm beside her.

She cupped the snow filled bowl, scooped up some on her fingers, trickled it down the nape of his neck, laughed as he tried to squirm away ... and then, suddenly, she stopped. He turned; saw the snow splattered with red, saw the scarlet spreading like spilt juice. He looked up to see his mother's slender, pale hand clamped over her face, but blood, it was blood, kept coming from between her fingers.

"Go get Mara, Alex," she said; her voice was oddly calm, measured and soft, but her eyes were sad. He scrambled off the bed, fell to the floor, left a bloody handprint on the carpet, and he yelled and he yelled and Mara came and the door was shut against him and everything after that was noise and confusion and strange men and the sound of his father crying.

It was the only time he ever heard his father cry.

It was the last time he shared the snow with his mother.

)0(

The years passed, and the boy grew, became a stripling, almost didn't become a man. The silences between son and father were winters that never ended, pale and chill. There was blood between them, thin and strained but blood all the same. Sometimes, in his dreams, he saw the blood that both bound them and tore them apart, a scarlet stain that painted the walls of his nightmares.

From there it seemed only natural to fall into the easy metaphors of snow and mirrors and allegories much prettier than the reality of a boy who snorted and shot up and fucked anything that moved and kept his heart in a box so that it might never be broken again. 

Until he finally woke up one pale, grey morning, his pale body stained and sticky, to find the huntsman his father had set upon him smiling, sword in hand. He knew that his days of hiding were over, that there was no longer any peace, however fleeting, to be found here. He left behind the mirror and the white. He washed his hands but could not wash away the stench, the memories, the nightmares. He enrolled in university and studied and learned and waited for the next loss to come.

It was in his twenty-first summer that his exile began, with nothing more than a phone call from his father, telling him that he had to leave the towers and the glass and go into the wilderness. His father spoke of empires and the education of kings, but he knew that old lion could smell the blood on him, that the stink of it repulsed him even as it bound them together. 

His father could not kill him, but he could make him the next best thing to dead. It might have been the summer of his years, but it was always that one, unending winter in his heart.

)0(

Steel and glass and water all around him, so cold it almost numbed the ache that never went away. He thought, for a fleeting moment, that he should just let this be it, let it be over, but he was his mother's son as much as he was his father's and so he fought the very thing he'd been courting all these years, struggled for breath even as the darkness closed over his head, choked the life from his body.

And then the burning came, a bright searing flare as life was pushed back into his body, as death was forced out. Everything hurt, but he *felt* every bit of it, felt each bruise and welt and his mouth was thick with the taste of blood and ... apples. He opened his eyes to see a man, a boy, hovering over him, all dark hair and deep eyes and full, sweet mouth and he thought, perhaps, that the blood had finally been washed away, that the winter was finally over.

)0(

The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Original posting note:  
> I've been thinking a lot about blood, lately.
> 
> It's beautiful and terrible, you know? It's life and death together. It's wine, it's earth, it's coppery sweet and foul all at the same time.
> 
> My body hoardes it up, sheds it in pain and sorrow and private. 
> 
> The thought of Scully, wan and white, fighting so *fucking* hard, that little scarlet trickle a betrayal of her will by her body, by the frailty of her flesh.
> 
> Lex, in his white-white suit, drenched in sanguine rains.
> 
> It's the most elemental magick there is, I think -- fire and water and carrying wind to the quiet clay of our sullied, scully-ied flesh.
> 
> Did I mention I get in weird headspaces? 
> 
> Blood led me here:
> 
> Disclaimer: So not mine. So not making money.


End file.
